35th Anniversary of Apollo 13 Splashdown

orac2 writes "35 years ago today, the crew of the Apollo 13 mission splashed down in the Pacific, after a harrowing four days following an oxygen tank explosion aboard their spacecraft. If you've only seen the Ron Howard movie, IEEE Spectrum has an article about what really went on in mission control to save the crew, with interviews with Gene Kranz, etc,and including a previously unreported hack the lunar module controllers had to come up with in real-time just to turn on the LM."

Comments

You know what's sad:

[kyle90]

How the story of Apollo 13 is a glowing testament to the bravery and persistence of the human spirit, but there always has to be the few people that come in and say "OMG we never landed on teh moon!" and ruin it for everyone else. It makes me sick that you would disrespect the people who were involved in the Apollo missions like that. What about the three astronauts who *died* in the fire on Apollo 1? You want to piss on their graves by saying that the moon landings never happened? I'm ashamed to be of the same species as you. Fucking bottom-feeders.

Re:It's all fiction anyways

[orac2]

Wow, GSCE's must suck. I studied Physics to degree level and the only bit of secondary school/high school science I really had to throw out was the "2 electrons fit into the first shell, then it's eight electrons per shell for all the rest" bit, and even then my Chemistry teacher warned us at the time that it was a horrible, horrible, over simplification, but a useful rule of thumb for getting a handle on the periodic table.

Everything else was an expansion of what we were taught, or new stuff. e.g., you've seen Newtonian mechanics, now here's Relativity, or you've seen this equation of motion using scaler variables, let's do it with vectors...

Re:Anniversaries...

[Simon Garlick]

Yes. It's amazing what having supplies of work-until-they-die concentration-camp slave labour did for the Nazi missile-weapons program.